natural treatment for smallpox disease fire

karen may: i'm karen may. i lead people developmenthere at google, and have the honor today,as you enjoy delicious food, of introducing michaelpollan to all of you. michael-- he doesn'tknow this yet, but his work haschanged my household. because we say toeach other, "eat food. not too much. mostly grains.

mostly plants." so we use our foodrules quite regularly. and i think, for manyof us, michael's work directly and indirectlyhas changed our households for the better. one of michael'srules that many of you know-- since you're here,i'll assume you know-- is to not eat food that yourgrandmother wouldn't recognize as food.

and i understandthat's been revised to great- great- grandmother,depending on how old you are. you have to continue to revisethat every 20 years or so. and based on when refinedsugar was introduced. but we do, also in myhousehold, tease each other-- would your grandmotherrecognize that? put that down! grandma wouldn't recognize that. so i think you've made--you've raised consciousness

around the world, in a waythat i don't know if you know the full extent ofthe personal impact. but it's quite lovely. and i'm pleased-- this is notmichael's first time here, but pleased to welcomehim back to our talks at google series, multi-yearseries, and to have you here. michael's work, asmany of you know well, the body of work precedingthe current book, "cooked," really takes us through kind ofa look at industrialized food,

if you will. and michael tacklesagribusiness, and throws devastating criticismat processed food. and i sort of see you, asi experience your work, as one part writer, onepart historian, and one part social activist. there's probably anotherpart, nutritionist, and then another part, sort ofcurious learner in there as well, if i put mydevelopment hat on.

but all of that comestogether to create a very accessiblebody of work that's both thought-provokingand behavior-changing. so, in this current book,"cooked," michael sort of tackles, literally, theart of cooking and helps us see cooking notonly as from kind of a social-historicalperspective, but also about what happens asyou bring ingredients together, and the impact onsociety, on environment,

on families, aswell as the impact on general kind ofsocial connectivity. so i think we takesomething as potentially simple and unidimensionalas heating food in fire, and turning itinto something that infuses the socialfabric in which we live. so it's very exciting. i am very fortunate to be lovedby two great cooks, my mother and my husband.

i am very fortunate. and in reading"cooked," i developed a deeper understandingof some of their passion, and where that mightcome from, as well as appreciation for the giftthat they give to me. so, on behalf of the googlershere and watching us virtually, welcome to google and thank you. michael pollan:thank you, karen. thank you very much.

thank you. i think this is my fourth visit. and the last timei was here it was because there had beena program to give out copies of "food rules." i don't know ifany of you were-- there's a lucky recipient. and i see it's had an impact. you all look verysvelte and healthy.

so it works. very glad to see that. and i'm also glad to see peopleeating at an event about food, despite the sign aswe entered that said, no eating in this room. but, honored in the breach. what i'd like to do isfirst try to tell you a little bit aboutthis project i've been on for the last coupleyears, which was mastering--

that's a strong word--the art of cooking, and the transformationsthat we call cooking. but first i want tostart by putting it in the context ofother books of mine, and of the journeythat i've been on since i startedcoming here, really. and that is, followingthe food chain. i mean, that's the story of mywork over the last dozen or so years, has been trying to figureout where our food comes from

and where it goes. and i started thisjourney, really, with "omnivore's dilemma." and that was an attempt to tracefour different kinds of meals back to theirsource on the farm. and what we eatconnects us to the land. it's our most profoundconnection to nature, is our eating. although most of usare not aware of it

as such because we'renow so disconnected from the source of our food. and we live at the end of avery long and intricate food chain that's largely opaque. and so in that book, i triedto follow the food back to the land, and seehow it was created out of soil and chemicals andfossil fuel and sunlight, depending on whatkind of food it was. and then after i did that book,people just were asking me,

you talked about everydimension of food except health. and what i reallywant to know is, what are the linksbetween diet and health. what i eat andwhat happens to me. and so i plunged into anotherproject, equally exotic to me. and i should tell you,whatever expertise i have, i've acquired as a journalist. not with any-- i have noacademic training in food studies or nutrition orbiochemistry or all the things

i should have taken in college. i was an english major. and so i delved into nutrition,and looked at, what do we know, and more importantly,what don't we know about the linksbetween what we eat and our odds of chronic disease,our likelihood of getting obese, all these kind of things. it's remarkable how much wedon't know about nutrition. and so i was looking at thesetwo ends of the food chain, one

after the other. the earth end, and the body end. and i hadn't reallypaid much attention to the middle of the food chain. which is to say, the areawhere the stuff coming off of the farms gets transformedinto the meals we eat, and how it gets transformed,and who does the transformation. and i was picking upclues along the way, though, looking atthe earth and looking

at the body, that thosetransformations were actually really important, and thatthey were driving changes going on at both endsof the food chain. so let me explain. so the industrializationof our agriculture, the rise of thesegiant monocultures of corn and soybeansall over the midwest, the rise of animal factories,where we put tens of thousands of the same species intightly controlled situations

and feed them these dietsthat maximize their growth, and these pharmaceuticalsthat also maximize their growth, thatwas very much driven or underwritten by the factthat we were no longer cooking. and that we were outsourcing ourcooking to large corporations. and when you let mcdonald's andburger king and olive garden and all the companiesmaking the processed food in the supermarketdo your cooking, they shop in a veryparticular way.

they want to buy from thebiggest possible suppliers of the most consistent,cheapest food. and so that themonocultures of corn and soy are very much drivenby fast food diets. that's what cornand soy is-- it's the building blocksof the fast food diet. the corn becomes thehigh fructose corn syrup, and the soy becomes the oil inwhich the fast food is fried. and i realized thiswhen i was studying,

i was looking atpotatoes, of all things, and i went to apotato farm, which was this amazinglandscape in idaho. it was 50,000 acres dividedinto these vast crop circles, each one 156 acres with a sweepsecond hand irrigation pivot that was putting out thewater or the fertilizer or the chemicals. and they were using one chemicalin particular-- it really stuck with me-- called monitor,that was such a toxic pesticide

that the farmers wouldn't go outinto their fields for like five days after theyspread it, because it was such a neurotoxin. and they explained--i said, why do you have to use this chemical? and they said,well, because we're growing russet burbanks, whichis the only kind mcdonald's will buy, and all theother-- and frito-lay, and all the other companies.

and it's a hard potato to grow. and i said, why dothey like that one? and they said, oh, it'sthe longest potato. so when we get ourmcdonald's french fries, we love that redenvelope with the bouquet of long french friescoming out of it. and the only wayyou can get that is with the russet burbank. problem is, russet burbanks aresusceptible to something called

net necrosis, those little brownlines you very occasionally will see in a potato,or brown dots. totally cosmetic defect. no problem eating that at all. but mcdonald's willnot tolerate it. so the way you dealwith net necrosis is monitor, which isthis horrible toxin. and i was thinking,god, so we're kind of complicit in thislandscape i'm looking at.

and indeed it isdriven by the fact that we are lettingmcdonald's cook our french friesin a certain way. so that's one side, andthat's one example of how the collapse ofcooking in america is driving the industrializationof our agriculture. and eric schlossertold the story really well in "fast food nation,"the links between the fast food industry and thenew ways of raising

chickens and hogsand corn and soy. on the other end, though, wheni was looking at the body, this was even more curious. i realized that thecollapse of cooking there was taking a hugetoll on our health. and although wecouldn't tell ourselves with real certaintythat saturated fat is the evil nutrient weshould avoid if we don't want to get fatter,get heart disease.

or sugar is the really badnutrient we should avoid. and we're totallystill pretty confused about nutrients, good and bad. what we did know was thathome-cooked food is-- people who eat a home-cookeddiet are much healthier than people who don't. and that the best predictorof a healthy diet, regardless of your income, was whetherit was cooked at home. and there's a very interestingstudy i came across that showed

that poor women who cook havehealthier diets than rich women who don't. so it even undoesthe usual class bias toward the poorer you are,the worse your diet is. if you're cooking,you can undo that. so both of theseclues were telling me, i really had to deal with thismiddle link of the food chain. why aren't we cooking? what is cooking?

and why were wewilling to let it go from so many of our lives? so that's what kindof got me started. there was also, though,a paradox i was noticing. and i started out bylooking at this, well whatever happened tocooking in america? and i wrote a long essay aboutthat for the new york times magazine, that ended up inthe book in another form. but there was thisreally curious paradox,

which was as rates of homecooking were declining, from more than anhour per person per day in 1965,to 27 minutes now, with four minutesfor cleaning up. which, i know, whatkind of cleaning up can you do in four minutes? and it's kind of suggesting thatcooking is not too ambitious, that you're crumplinga pizza box, or throwing out sometakeout containers.

and indeed, if you askthe marketing experts, will you define cooking for me? is it cooking from scratch? oh no, we can't evenmeasure scratch cooking. that's too small. it's the combinationof any two ingredients qualifies as cooking. so i said, so bottledsalad dressing over pre-washed greens?

cooking. slice of meat betweentwo pieces of bread? and in fact, the sandwich is themost popular meal in america, both for lunch and dinner today. and so we werecooking less time, and cooking less in what mostof us really think is cooking. but at the same timewe were cooking less, we were obsessing aboutcooking as a culture. and we were watchingcooking shows on tv.

and we have magazinesdevoted to chefs who have become cultural heroes. and this struck me isthis interesting anomaly, in that what itsuggests-- ok, we're spending 27 minutes cooking. how long is the averagecooking show on tv? it's 30 minutes, or 60 minutes. so that meant therewere tens of millions of americans who werespending more time watching

other people cook ontelevision than were actually cooking themselves. and i don't need totell you that you can't eat the food you seegetting cooked on television. you can't even smell it. and yet, we were doing it. and so i wanted to understandwhat that was about. because if you think about ourlives, there's plenty of stuff we've outsourced tocorporations, right?

i mean, we don't change theoil on our car anymore, right? we don't work onour cars anymore. we can't. we can't figurethem out anymore. we don't sew our ownclothing or darn socks. and there are many thingswe've let go, we've outsourced, and we have not looked back. no problem. don't miss that.

and i don't watch tv aboutchanging the oil in my car, or darning socks. there are no showsabout that stuff. i mean, i'm sureyou could find them if you dig deep enoughinto the cable channels. but in general,they're not popular. so why is cooking different? i think it's a realclue to us that cooking has a certain importance--an emotional importance

and i would argue, even geneticimportance to our species. and i want to tryto convince you that cooking is central toour identity as humans, that to do it is an agricultural act. to paraphrase wendellberry, who said, "eating is an agricultural act," i wouldsay cooking is even more so. it is a political act, andit is a therapeutic act. and how i came to this wasby learning how to do it. i mean, i essentiallyapprenticed myself

to masters of thefour transformations that i think we can breakcooking down into, each of which representsa technology. and i want to quickly runyou through what those four technologies are, in order. but before i do, this paradoxprobably owes to the fact that we all still havevery powerful memories of being cooked for, of beingin the kitchen with our parents, probably our mothers, and thatincredible process of watching

her conduct thesetransformations, at the end of which is thisprofound gift from parent to child, of something youlove to eat, a favorite food. i mean, i can remember thefoods that my mother would make for me on mybirthday, or things that-- the dish during thecourse of the week that was just-- i loved. and so it goes kind ofdeep in our lives, i think. and we remember those smells.

we remember thattransaction of love. and so that's part of it. but it turns out itgoes even deeper. and when i said that it'skind of hard-wired into us, i meant that quite literally. what we've learned inrecent anthropology is that the transformationin our evolution that separated usfrom the apes and led to the growth of our brainsand the shrinking of our jaws

and our gut, which happensabout 1.8 million years ago, when we become-- evenbefore we were human. before we're homo sapiens--when we're homo erectus. that dramatictransformation has kind of mystified archaeologistsand anthropologists for a long time. what would cause sucha profound change? and for a while they thoughtmaybe it was meat-eating. but meat-eating can'treally explain it,

because eatingraw meat, in fact, you need a giant jaw to chew it. it's really hardto chew, and you need a big gut todigest it, because it's really hard to digest. what it really is, itappears, is the discovery of cooking with fire. and when we figuredout this amazing trick, this critical technology,these amazing changes happened.

and the reason is thatwhen you cook food, essentially you externalizemuch of the work and the energyneeded for digestion. so that instead of yourbody having to do it all-- and we burn a lot of caloriesdigesting, or we used to-- it takes place, the partialbreakdown of the proteins and the carbohydratesand the fats. and it becomes detoxified,and it becomes easier to chew. it's a huge deal.

and it really gives us thistremendous evolutionary edge, because it also gives us accessto foods other animals can't eat like tubers, most of whichare toxic unless you cook them. cassava, potatoes. you eat raw potatoes, youcan have solanine poisoning. but we found when you cookthem, you could eat them. and so we had thisnew stash of calories that other animals didn't have. so it gave us a big edge.

but this energetic--this boom of energy we got from cookingfood appears to be what underwrites thegrowth of our brains. our brains are tremendousenergy guzzlers. they take up about 2%of your body weight, but they use 20% ofthe energy you take in. so it's expensiveto maintain a brain. and you can't do itwithout cooked food. so you raw foodists, take note.

now, raw food, you ask. ok, well, there arepeople who eat raw food. and some people try todo raw food exclusively. but most of themdon't do very well. and half of the women on rawfood diets stop menstruating. they're not gettingenough energy. and anyone who does do raw foodis highly blender-dependent. i mean, if you know anypeople who cook raw food, they'd be literallydead without a blender,

because that's doingall that chewing and that work of digestion. so i would say thatactually qualifies as a primitive form of cooking. so we need cooked food. it's now hardwired into us. we're dependent on it. we're obligate cooks. now, the other thing,though, that fire

gave us is it freedup a lot of time. before we cooked with fire,we spent a very large portion of our day chewing. and if you look at apesthat are our size, similar weight and size, they spendhalf of their waking hours in the act of chewing. six hours a day, chewing. it's no wonder theydon't get a lot done. you can't have a culture ifyou're spending half your time

chewing. you can't have art. you can't have software. there's all sortsof things-- well, you probably couldhave software. so it was a great boon to us. and the last thingcooking gave us, and why i think it isso important socially, is that when you startcooking with fire,

you start eatingin a different way. cooking gave usnot just the stuff, but the occasion, the meal. and here's how. if you're cookingover a fire, remember this is pre matchesand lighters. keeping the fire going isa tremendous undertaking, and requires a lotof cooperation. so you need someone tokind of tend the fire,

while someone else is huntingor preparing the food. and it becomescooperative in a way that hunting andgathering never had to be. in hunting and gathering,you could eat food wherever you found it. you might bringing some home foryour family, or you might not. but as soon as you cook,you need cooperation. and you also need tolearn how to share. because if you're cooking thisbig beautiful chunk of kudu,

or whatever thisanimal is that you get, you have to restrainyourselves from eating it before it's ready. and if you don't have rulessurrounding your meal, you will find the biggest,strongest, hungriest, greediest animal will getthe food, and you won't. so with meat-eating aroundfires becomes the rudiments of civilization. a lot of civilization is aboutrestraining your instincts,

learning rules ofsocial engagement. and many, many thingshappen around that fire, including probably language. and this rulemaking,though, is that we're going to divide it thisway, and you get this piece and i get this piece. this is the beginningof civilization. so cooking give us a lot. and as we cook less,we're losing a lot.

our brains are notgetting smaller, but our guts are getting larger. and we're not eatingaround the table as much, as we fail to cook. so cooking is reallyimportant to us as a species. and there are coststo outsourcing it. now we're still gettingcooked food, obviously. mcdonald's and thecafeteria here, everyone will giveyou cooked food.

and the problem isthat when we allow large corporations tocook-- and actually, we call it processed foodwhen corporations do it, cooking when humans do it-- whenwe allow corporations to cook for us, in general, andthere are exceptions, they don't cook very well. they tend to use the cheapestpossible raw ingredients, and to use the mostsalt, fat, and sugar to make that food acceptable.

we love salt, fat, and sugar. we evolved to-- we have buttonsthat you can push very easily. we need those nutrients. the problem is, in nature,they're pretty rare. in modern industrialeconomy, they're really cheap and easy to add,and everybody loves them. and when you layerthem together, you get food that'sirresistible, that stimulates cravings.

and that's why the industry,the food processing industry, works with them so much. and they're just verycheap to add to a food. so that's one problem,that you're not going to get highquality ingredients and it's going to have toomuch salt, fat, and sugar. another problem, though,which is a little more subtle, is that corporationsare very good at cooking certain things,like french fries.

classic example. there's something about homecooking that basically gives you a nudge in the direction ofsimple foods, simply prepared. any of you madefrench fries before? it's a pain. i mean, they're wonderful,but you have to, like, peel the potato-- wash thepotato, peel the potato, cut the potato, heat upthis big thing of fat, and then spatteryour whole kitchen.

it's a mess. and then you have toget rid of all that fat. and you're not going to doit more than once a month, if you're an ambitious cook. you're just not going to fry. but mcdonald's, oranyone, or ore-ida, can make reallygood french fries so cheaply that theybecome ubiquitous. and so you end up eatingthis special occasion food,

that i think of it, becausei love french fries. many americans eatit twice a day. so when you outsourcecooking to corporations, they're going to make thoselabor-intensive, highly desirable cookies and cakes,too, which are also a pain. and so you don'tmake them that often. so what i'm saying,there's something built into the natureof home cooking that tends to keep youonto the healthier foods

than you can have. and it's the ubiquity of theselabor-intensive foods that gets a lot ofpeople into trouble. so that's another reason. and a food marketing expert italked to, this guy in chicago named harry balzer, wewere talking about-- and he works for theprocessed food industry. and i was saying,well, what are we going to do about thisobesity, this problem?

and he said, well, i'vegot the diet for america. you want to know how tocontrol weight in this country? and i'm, like, takingout my notebook, what is he going to tell me,the secret from deep within the heart of theprocessed food industry. he says, eat anythingyou want, as long as you cook it yourself. if you could actually dothat, any problems around food would disappear.

because you wouldn't havefrench fries that often. you wouldn't havedessert every night. and you would eat a healthydiet without counting calories, without looking atany ingredient labels. it would take care of itself. but that's easiersaid than done. so i kind of took theharry balzer challenge, and went out and triedto learn how to cook. and as i said, i divided cookinginto these four transformations

or technologies. and they happened to correspondto the classical elements. there is cookingwith fire, water, which is cooking inpots, with liquid. and then there's air,which is cooking-- which is baking, bread, whichis putting air into our food, which is very significant. and then fermentation-- earth. cooking withmicrobes, the microbes

that live in soil--many of them do. and most kinds ofcooking, you could put into one of thosetransformations or another. and i want to quicklyrun through what i learned about each one. and they're all interestingin their are different ways, and in each case i founda master to teach me. in the case of firecooking, i wanted to find the mostunreconstructed cooking,

the most like that primitivescene that i described, with the people around the fire. and that turned out tobe eastern north carolina barbecue. and i specify eastern, becauseif you go to western north carolina, they doit differently. but eastern northcarolina barbecue is whole hog, wood fire, time. that's the recipe.

a lot of time-- 20 hours, maybe. and it's just sosimple, but dressed up with lots of pretension, andlots of self-dramatizing men telling you how hard it is. but it's reallysimple, believe me. i've done it since. and i mean, guysknow that barbecue is all about takingsomething very simple and making it looklike a big deal.

and that's probably beengoing on for a very long time in human history. and one of things that struckme learning about barbecue-- and i explore the science ofit, like, why is cooked meat taste so much betterthan raw meat? and there are theseamazing chemical reactions that take place-- the maillardreaction and caramelization that create, like, 30,000 newcompounds that are elusive, that taste like other things,that just kind of complicate

the food in a reallyinteresting way, making it moremetaphorical, even, and less literal in ways thathumans always like doing that to everything-- tolanguage, and to food too. but the thing thatstruck me is that it's so rule-bound, even now. cooking the meat outdoorsis really rule-bound. and the barbecue pit mastershave-- they're, like, more rule-obsessedthan any rabbi

i've ever met about eating meat. and so i'll say, so what doyou think of the barbecue in over in westernnorth carolina? and they're like, well, thoseare pork shoulders with sauce. and that's good, butit's not barbecue. and i said, what about whatthey do in south carolina? well, they do a mustard-basedsauce and they're eating ribs, and that's not barbecue. and so it's likeit's not kosher.

over and over again,it was like kashrut for goys going onall over the south. so i was very struck by that. and there had beenthis long tradition that the priest and thebutcher and the chef, all through classical history, greekhistory, was the same person. {megaros}. one word for thosethree functions. that's how important it was,and how ceremonial it was.

and cooking meat is still veryceremonial, and it's very male, and it happens in avery theatrical manner. so that was the first science ofcooking, the first technology. the second big breakthrough,you have to leap forward way from 1.8 million years agoto just 10,000 years ago. and that is when webegin cooking in pots. it awaited pots. we needed to developthe technology to create clay-fired potsthat could withstand a fire,

and that you couldboil water in. this seems reallysimple, but it's actually a profound development. it's hard to imagineagriculture getting off the ground withoutthis technology. because a lot aboutagriculture is, is eating seeds, right-- grain. and it's very hard to eatgrain unless you've softened it in water, and you turn itinto a porridge or cooked rice

or whatever you're doing. so toasting grain, theselittle things over fires, you can't get a skewer on them. it doesn't really work. so it's no accidentthat cooking with water comes up at the exact sametime that agriculture begins. and they're probablyclosely allied, and there's probably a chickenand egg phenomenon going on. but when you cando this now, you

can do all sorts of new things. you can combine vegetableswith meat, for example. you can eat partsof animals that are very tough, because youcan break it down slowly. you can braise it and stew it. and what i learned to dowas braising and stewing in this chapter. working with a youngchapanese chef in berkeley. and you begin to have cuisines.

cooking meat over fire,if you close your eyes you couldn't tell if youwere in brazil, or north carolina-- leaving the sauceaside-- or europe, or china. it's meat over fire. but as soon as youcook in pots, and you can mix thesevegetables with it, you get thesearomatic vegetables like onions and garlic,or onions and pepper, these differentcombinations of vegetables

that really mark a foodas part of a culture. so if it has a mirepoixbase, that's french cooking. that's onions andcelery and-- i always forget-- carrots,thank you very much. and then there'sthe asian mirepoix. there are theseflavor principles that you really can'testablish until you're cooking in pots with liquid. and the other cool thing aboutit is there's no waste anymore.

it's a very economicalway to cook, because when you'recooking meat over fire you have the drippingfat, which is all very nutritious, actually. and you're losingall those calories. but in a pot, youget everything. you save it all, and youget the amazing dividend that is a sauce. you can't have saucebefore you have these pots.

so it does a lot for cuisine. it also does a lot,interestingly enough, for the human lifespan. once upon a time, when you onlyhad meat cooked over fires, you couldn't wean a babyuntil they had some teeth and could eat it, or you wouldhave to chew it for them. but now, you can make thesesoft soups and porridges that allow you towean babies earlier, which is a greatboon to society,

because you can increasepopulation and have babies spaced more closely together. and then on the otherend of the lifespan, you can keep oldpeople alive longer. because previously, whenyou lost your teeth, you were kind of screwed. but now, you havethese foods, these gruels that you can keep peoplealive even without teeth. so the pot actuallyexpands human lifespan,

and so it's a veryimportant technology. now let me leap ahead. i'm going to go quickly,because i really do want to hear your questions. and we can talk aboutthis, or anything else you want to talk about. bread. one of my favoritetechnologies of all. bread is discoveredin egypt, it is

thought, about 6,000 years ago. how? well, probably whathappened is somebody made one of those porridgesthat i was describing. it was some grass seed, andground, and then added water, and lost track of it. didn't eat it. and it just sat off in a corner. and some yeast andbacteria got into it,

and somebody looked atit one day and says, wow, that's bubbling,and it's gotten big. it's twice as bigas it was before, which is kind of amazing. wow, i just got morefood by leaving it alone? and then they thought, hey,let's put it in the oven and see what happens. and even more miraculous,it doubled again in size. and so you can see why breadbecame this miracle that's

part of the eucharist,the catholic communion. because it does seem to comefrom nothing, or very little. and it becomes quite big. and what's happened,of course, is it's air is the additional food. or "food." but we've added air to the food. and the significance ofthis was driven home to me by a food scientist iinterviewed for the book, a guy

at davis named brucegerman, who said if i gave you a bag offlour, even whole wheat flour, and water, you couldlive on that for a little while, but not very long. you would eventually die. but, if you took that water andflour and turned it into bread, you could live indefinitely. so what's going on? why is that such animportant transformation

from dough, essentially,he's saying, to bread? well, he explainedwhat's happening. when you have that starterculture, that sourdough-- which is a culture of both yeast,fungi, and bacteria-- when you introduce them to thatwet mass of flour and water, they start digestingthe polysaccharides, the long-chain proteinsand carbohydrates. and the microbescreate these enzymes that break downthose long chains.

the reason they'rein long chains is that the seed--remember we're talking abouteating seeds here-- that the seed haseverything needed for the nextgeneration of plants. it's an amazingpantry of nutrients. it's got it all. fat, protein, carbohydrate,minerals, vitamins, antioxidants, it's all there.

but it's locked up tight,because the plant doesn't want to give it away to animals. it wants to keep it intact forthe developing, the germinating seedling. but what the microbesthat we introduced do is they break down those--they break into the pantry and break it down intomuch more digestible forms, into short-chaincarbohydrates or sugars, and proteins thatbecome amino acids.

so that's the firsttransformation, is during that fermentation. and then the secondtransformation comes when you bake it. now you know from yourelementary physics that if you have boilingwater or something like that, it can't really get hotter thanthe boiling point, at which point it turns into steam. but if you enclose itin the crust of a bread,

you create a pressure cookerin which all those little air pockets inside getreally hot and steamy. and steam can get much hotterthan the boiling point. and you can drive it upto 300, 400, 500 degrees. and what that extremeheat does is thoroughly cook the carbohydrates so thatthey become very digestible, and much more sweetand delicious. so this is aprofound technology, for taking a mush of grassseeds and turning it into a food

that you can live on, unlessyou're gluten-intolerant. but people weren't thatgluten-intolerant back then. we can talk about that later. and so, veryprofound technology. and i worked with-- ifsome of you, i'm sure, live in san francisco-- chadrobertson, who bakes at tartine and makes what i think is thebest bread in the whole world. and i spent a lot of timelearning from him how to bake, and when i wasmaking my starter,

i didn't know whether it was okto ask a famous baker to take some of theirstarter or not, and i thought it wasn'ta cool question. but i made a point of shakinghis hands every time i saw him and not washing my hands, andthen adding it to my starter. so i ended up with atartine-ish starter that's very lively, untili went on book tour. and i neglected it fortwo months and it died. so i need to see chadover lunch very soon

and shake his hand, yeah. so that was air. and then the last sectioni want to talk about is, for me, what was probablythe most fascinating. and that was thismethod of cooking without the use ofany heat whatsoever, purely through theaction of microbes. what an amazing thing that thesemicrobes can give us everything from wine to cheese tosauerkraut and kimchi

and pickles, to chocolate,which is a fermented food. i don't know ifyou realize that. and coffee, which mustbe fermented before you can grind the beans. it's an amazing thing that wecan use bacteria in this way. it began as a foodpreservation strategy. before refrigeration,how would you preserve the harvest toget through the winter, until you had another harvest?

well, you did itby fermenting food. and it's still going on. i was in chinarecently, and they'll take a bunch of cabbages andthey'll throw them in a pit and cover it was soil. and the lactobacilluswill go to work. they're already on the leaves ofcabbages, and everything else. they're on you. and just like they're waitingto ferment you when you die,

they are waiting to fermentcabbages when they die. and so they start breakingdown the vegetable matter, releasing lactic acid, which ofcourse is a great preservative, and makes them more nutritious. so i grew up in a verymicrobe-phobic family, like most of us didin recent years. and my mother wasterrified of bacteria. and if she dropped a can ofgreen beans on the ground and it got a dent, she we sureit had contracted botulism

and we had to throw it out. and so we had lotsof hand-washing and all the normal things. but i met this generation,this subculture of what i call "fermentos"--people kind of obsessed with fermentation. and they're all around us now. and they're a veryinteresting subculture. they go a littlefurther than i do.

i mean, they'll eatroadkill and high-meat, and they love bacteria. and they're tryingto renegotiate the terms of our relationshipwith these microbes. and i think in that, they'rereally on to something. they're very casualabout hygiene. you'll ask them for arecipe and i'll say, well, shouldn't i wash that crockfirst, or that cabbage? no, don't wash it, because ithas the good bacteria on it.

and it turns out though,they're on to something. i mean, we're learningthat our war on bacteria, even though it has helpedconquer several diseases, has also led tovarious problems. and it is probablyour lack of contact with bacteria aschildren that is leading to these high ratesof allergy and asthma and autoimmune disease. that's the hygiene hypothesis.

but we're alsolearning more recently that the ecosystemof microbes that live in your large intestine--i mean they're all over you, but especially there-- arevery important to your health. and that-- i don't know if youknow this, but you are only 10% human. 90% of the cells that youare, that are on your body and in your body, thosebelong to microbes. you're a super organism.

and our health is,in significant ways, mediated by the healthof that ecosystem. and we have in ourantibiotic culture, literally antibiotic culture,we've been killing off a lot of those microbes. we have not been ingestingthem in our diet, with the result that ourbiodiversity internally is dramatically lower thanit is in people probably 50 years ago, and we know inhunter-gatherer populations

that have these wild, wildlydiverse and very healthy microbiomes. so the fermentos arereally on to something. and i look in the bookat the biology of this, what we're learningabout the microbiome and how it affects our health. and that was fascinating to me. it's leading to arevolution in medicine that we will all feelvery soon, although we

don't have to wait for it. i mean, eatingmore fermented food is what a lot ofthese doctors will tell you is a good thing to do. i'm talking aboutsauerkraut and pickles and all that live culture food. but as important asfermentation is biologically, it's very important culturallytoo, and this kind of surprised me.

a great many cultureshave a fermented food they love that other peoplethink is kind of disgusting. and they're polarizing foods. i'm thinking of stinky cheesesand kimchi and sauerkraut. and if you go tochina, they love something called stinky tofu. i don't know if any ofyou have ever had it. it's well-named. it's essentially tofuthat's been marinated

in rotten vegetables, just blackslime of rotten vegetables, usually outdoors. and then maybe if you'relucky, fried after that. it actually-- if you canget it past your nose, it doesn't taste that bad. they love it. and yet they thinka cheese, even kind of a not so stinkycheese, a cheddar or something, is the most disgustingfood imaginable.

they will not-- they can'tbelieve we like cheese. and they say-- and it's oily andthe taste stays in your mouth, whereas stinky tofu, it's soclean and the taste disappears. although, what kind ofpraise is that for a food, that the tastequickly disappears? i will also point out that theyeat stinky tofu exclusively outdoors. so anyway, cultures have this. and the koreans are veryproud of their kimchi.

and when i went tokorea, i went to korea to learn how to make kimchi. and i went to thekimchi museum, in seoul. i went to one on thesouth side of the river. there's another one on thenorth side of the river. and there are a total ofsix kimchi museums in korea. and when i was there, iasked the docent a question. i saw all these groupsof kindergartners with their little uniformsand yellow backpacks trooping

through, learning how kimchiis made-- the urns, the spice mixes, and everything. i said, why do youbring kindergartners to a kimchi museum? and this woman said,because children are not born liking kimchi. ok. it is, by definition, it isthe definition of an acquired taste.

and these fermented foodsare all acquired tastes. and they're one of theways-- culture's very much about drawing lines, right? and they're one of the waysthat we define ourselves against other cultures. and i'm convinced--i couldn't write about this, because theresearch isn't there-- but that these foods actuallychange our bodily odors in ways that make us eithervery comfortable or very

uncomfortable. so anyway, fermentedfoods are really interesting on manydifferent levels. and i learned howto make cheese. i worked with awonderful nun who's a cheesemaker anda microbiologist. and she actuallybelieves-- she makes this beautiful cheesein connecticut. and she makes itin a wooden barrel,

which is the most-- youknow, it drives the health department crazy,because you can't sterilize a wooden barrel. and in fact, the recipe forthis traditional french cheese she makes specifies, don'tsterilize the wooden barrel. just rinse it out. because they'rereally good bacteria that live in thelittle crevices. and in fact, she proved tothe health authorities, when

they tried to shut her down ormake her use stainless steel, like every othercheesemaker in america, she got two vats ofraw milk from her cows, right in the abbey. and she introduced e.coli into both vats, and waited a couple hours. and at the end ofthree or four hours, the stainless steel vatwas so teeming with e.coli that it was toxic.

you couldn't-- that wouldbe condemned, that milk. and the milk inthe wooden barrel, it had vanishinglysmall levels of e. coli. and what had happened? the lactobacillus thatlived in the wooden barrel started-- they callit lactobacillus-- eating the lactose,their favorite food, breaking it down into lacticacid which killed the e. coli. so you see, these peoplehave been practicing

a kind of folk microbiology forhundreds and hundreds of years. and she's mastered that. and the health department wentaway after this demonstration. and she really believesthe cheese is so wonderful that it belongsin the eucharist, along with those othertwo fermented foods, wine and bread. and she thinks cheese is abetter reminder of the body than bread is, because it rotsand reminds us of mortality.

and it's like, it'sa heretical idea, but it's kind of beautiful also. so, a lot of thecooking i did is not things you're goingto do every day. it's really extreme cooking,making cheese or kimchi-- although kimchi is reallyeasy to make-- and sauerkraut and baking bread. but i found that doingthis, even every now and then, is an incrediblysatisfying process.

when we learn how to dosomething for ourselves that is not what we do at work,it's really empowering. so many of us, we live insuch a specialized culture. and we've gotten really goodat the one thing that we do and selling to the market. and we've outsourcedeverything else in our lives--our entertainment, our exercise to someextent, our food certainly. and there's somethingwonderful about that.

it makes this economy go around. but there's somethingdebilitating about it too, and something infantilizing. the fact that we're so dependenton fossil fuel, which is really what allows us to doall this outsourcing, and so dependenton other people, that it feels really goodwhen you do something, you learn a newskill that actually is in support of your body.

and so few of ushave these anymore. and i found there was-- itwas a very satisfying way to spend time, to learnhow to bake bread. and learning todiversify your talents, learning how to take care ofyourself to a greater extent, i really think,is a precondition for the kinds of politicalchanges we need in this world. i just don't think we're goingto tackle things like climate change until people can imagineliving in a different way.

and if you'rehighly specialized, you can't imagine livingin a different way-- without that car,without that fossil fuel, without that restaurantto cook your meals. but as soon as you realize,oh, i could do this, suddenly you're open to change. and so that's why i saidit's a political act. take back control ofyour diet, take back control of somepart of your life

that you've been lettingother people do for yourself. not every day, evenjust occasionally. i think you'll find it feelsempowering and really good. so i'm going to leave it there. we have a microphone hereif anybody has questions. i'm happy to talk aboutcooking, gluten intolerance. and i forgot to mentionthere is one animal that does cook, at least one animal. if you include fermentationunder the definition

of cooking, squirrels cook. any animal that buries theirfood is not just hiding it. they're starting thatearth-driven process of breakdown, to make thatseed, that acorn healthier. so we're not quite theonly animal who cooks. audience: back to the microbes. i think it's great thatyou've sort of helped get a lot people excitedabout what is clearly becoming a pretty big dealscientifically,

understanding themicrobiota and how much it affects all our health. i have a two yearold daughter, so i'm very keen to make sureshe's exposed to enough of the right microbes,but my wife probably also, intelligently, is worriedabout exposing her to too many of thewrong microbes. so i'm just curious,have you figured out, for people who are sort ofenlightened about this stuff,

but still-- we're in aworld where the bugs are kind of hostile,and there aren't a lot of things that are--the good bugs [inaudible] it's hard to get raw milk, et cetera. are there good practicalways to get access to more bugs in yourdiet without being too off the reservation? michael pollan: yeah. well, i mean, eatingwhatever fermented foods

that your daughter likes. if she likes yogurt, great. kids tend not to likesauerkraut and kimchi. i mean, they'restrongly flavored foods. but try it. but the other thing isnot just in the diet, but in the lifestyle. there's a lot ofresearch showing that kids who grow up onfarms, especially ones who

eat raw milk, drink raw milk,but are exposed to animals, have much lower ratesof autoimmune disease. so raw milk is a complicatedone, and a risky one. and i don't simplyrecommend it, unless you're very confident of the farmerwho's selling it to you. but taking your kid to farms,having pets-- even having pets has been correlated with lowerrates of autoimmune disease. so those exposures while she'sthat age-- her immune system is being trained right now.

and exposure to bacteria duringthat training is a good thing. hand washing is stilladvised, actually, because of-- that's how manygerms are conveyed among kids. and not that that's a badthing, but it's inconvenient if your kid is sick a lot. you're probably buildingher immune system every time shegets an infection. so, exposure toanimals, really good, any kind of food that haslive bacteria is really good.

audience: thanks. michael pollan: sure. audience: i've read, i guess,all four of your food books. and one thing i don'tremember you writing about is a currently popular, ormaybe faddish trend in food, and that ismolecular gastronomy. or as nathan myhrvold callsit, modernist cuisine. audience: it certainlyviolates your grandmother recognizing it.

michael pollan: well,not always, because-- audience: but atsame time, it doesn't seem to have any ofthe bad things that led you to suggest that rule. so what do you think? michael pollan: i did lookinto molecular gastronomy. and in fact, nathan servedme a beautiful lunch up at his mad scientist labin seattle, as part of it. and i was very interestedin it, and that kind of food

is interesting andartistically engaging, but i don't think it's central. i don't think it'sgoing to change the way we eat any time soon. and so i think it was a littletoo rarefied for me to explore. i was really, inthis book, trying to get back to the fundamentals,the basics of cooking. and he's on thefrontier of cooking. which is interesting,but i don't

know that we're all going to bedoing sous-vide and using some of the techniques he's using,even though it produces interesting food. i was trying very much notto write a foodie book. this is not a foodies' book. i hate that term. i think our food culturegets a little bit decadent at various points, inthe way we're eating sometimes. and so we reallywanted to concentrate

on familiar foods that areavailable to everybody at home. even thoughintellectually i find what he's doing fascinating. there may be someapplications at some point of what he's doing. and if we can figureout a way to use the techniques ofthe food scientist to make food more nutritious,i think that would be great. it's striking how little ofthat work has succeeded so far.

that, in general, and itell the story in the book, in the bread chapter, processingfood for thousands of years consistently made it healthier. coming up with fermentation,cooking in pots, breadmaking. at a certain point, westarted processing food to make it less healthy, tomake it have a longer shelf life, mostly. and it happens when we go fromwhole wheat, stone-ground flour to white flour.

and so that's kind ofan interesting story. and it may be nathan isat the beginning of a move toward figuring out howto again use technology to make food more healthy again. but not much has happenedin that area yet. audience: if i can make justone final comment on this, you can now get areally good immersion circulator for only $200. i think in 10 or 15years, sous-vide cooking

is going to be like ablender or food processor. michael pollan: it may be. i'd be curious. the last big addition hasbeen the microwave, which is an interesting technologyand it's really good for, like, heating up your cup of tea. it's not reallygood for cooking. and i don't think it'svery good for family life, because you do onething at a time.

so i look forwardto the new gadget that we'll put in ourkitchens that will actually make cooking easier, and makethe food more nutritious. and that might be it. audience: so i come from afamily of traditional rice farmers in southern india. and when i was growingup, 90% of everything i would eat with my grandparentscame from the land around them. they grew it themselves.

a couple generations later,many of us, including me, have chosen topursue other things like develop software andchew food for six hours a day, in an ape like fashion,and outsourcing our food production to other people,and cooking to google. but no one i know aroundthis area actually says, i want to be an alfalfafarmer or a wheat farmer. everyone wants topursue other careers. and i wonder in50 years from now,

will anybody be available togrow this fundamental thing that hedge fund managersand software engineers still need for their survival. who will be there? who will grow the food? michael pollan: i thinkthat's a great question. well, i actually said atdinner the other night with the 125th employeeof your corporation, who is now a farmer.

his farm is supportedby his google stock. [laughter] but he's doingreally interesting, good farming somewhere in marin. and in fact, i'vemet a succession of people who workin your industry who have gotten the bug. i mean, one of the encouragingthings going on right now is, for the first timesince we've been keeping track, the number of farmers inamerica is ticking up.

it's been goingdown consistently since we had-- since wemeasured it, since 1900, say. and there is a generationof young people who's very engaged by thework of farming, which is really importantbecause you point to the big problem withindustrial agriculture. it doesn't requirea lot a labor. we basically tradedlabor on the farm for chemicals and machines.

and we're payingthe cost of that. it's very hard to growgood quality, nutritious, chemically-free food withoutmore people on the land. and we will need manymore people on the land if we really wantto eat sustainably. but there's also growingfood in your own home, which is not trivial. i mean, during theworld war ii, about 40% of the fresh producein america was

being grown by individualsin their gardens. there's no reason wecouldn't do that again even while developing software. so i think thechallenge, though, is going to be inplaces like india, that-- there are many peoplewho want to stay on the land, there are many people who don'twant to stay on the land-- that the option of stayingon the land is preserved. because that's indanger in many places.

i mean, there is a vision ofindustrializing, developing world agriculture onoffer right now, that threatens to floodthe cities and lead to a kind of agriculture thatwill be very hard to sustain because it's sofossil fuel-dependent. so we do live in aspecialized economy. we need people to grow our food. the best thing we can doas people writing books, or developing software is,pay them a living wage.

make it attractive. one of my food rulesis pay more, eat less. good food, sustainablefood, does cost more. and those of us who can affordto support those farmers need to do it. we need to make it a veryattractive way of life, so that we will draw morepeople into doing it. and we will payfarmers for doing something, as yourecognized, is so dependent.

no matter what we'redoing, we still need food. and food still comesfrom the earth. and to ignore that connectionand lose track of it, i think, is a tragedy. so it begins withsupporting farmers who are doing good work. thanks for your good question. audience: well, i was goingto ask a final question, but we've run out of time.

so everybody join mein thanking michael for coming back to google. michael pollan:thank you very much.